SynthaSite: Easy Web Site Building

SynthaSite's goal is to provides Web site building, publishing, and hosting for anyone at all, and for free, to boot.

SynthaSite's goal is to provides Web site building, publishing, and hosting for anyone at all, and for free, to boot. The site's application is similar to that of desktop publishing software such as Microsoft Publisher, and people with little to no skill in Web site editing and design will be pleased with how user-friendly the interface is. Everything you need to edit a site is there, but you need to look carefully at each little editing icon--there are many of them!The columns at leftlist the different pages of the site. Next to that is the main body of the site, and to the right of that are categories listing various widgets (photos, video, forms, etc.) On the very right you can choose different styles and widgets as well.

SynthaSite has multiple layout styles to cater to your specific needs. In the one that I experimented with, links to my newly created pages were placed in a table on the left-hand side of the page. This is useful for quick editing.

Placing images and text is easily done by drag-and-drop. SynthaSite also allows for online photo editing through a partnership with picnik.com, which is adequate for the needs of business owners looking to create a site on a budget, college newspapers looking for alternative Web space to what their universities give them, and just about anyone that wants to create a site easily and without extra files/programs on their hard drives.

"Google Sites is about social enablement; it allows collaboration from different communities or clubs for a common resource, but it doesn't allow much customization as far as appearances and functionality. When you look at those sites, they tend to look like wikis. With SynthaSite, the focus is on easily creating great-looking sites with the functionality small businesses (and many personal users) need," says Vinny Lingham, CEO of SynthaSite. "It's also easy to publish widgets and pull in content from 3rd party websites such as Flickr and YouTube, which we are seeing a huge demand for."

The best part of all is that there is no need for FTP servers. Any file can be uploaded straight to the editor. That means you're saving a lot of extra time and bandwidth. Once you click that publish button, your website will be available for viewing instantly- with no latency.